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The Ministry of Interior said Monday that it killed seven people in a gunfire exchange in Assiut, after attempting to arrest them on accusations of belonging to a terrorist cell adopting the ideology of the Islamic State (IS) militant group.

Parliament’s Legislative and Constitutional Affairs Committee has approved a bill which grants the president powers to appoint Egypt’s top judicial posts. The decision, which affects all judicial branches, has been decried as a blow to the independence of the judiciary.

As parliamentary elections draw near, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi described the Constitution, two years after it was ratified, as flawed. “The Constitution gave the parliament broad powers, with good intentions,” he said in a speech on Sunday. “But the country cannot be run on good intentions.”

Just over a year ago, Egyptians living abroad voted in a referendum on a new constitution put forward by an elected Muslim Brotherhood-led government, which was ousted by the army last July following a period of violent unrest.

Egypt’s military is on high alert ahead of the referendum on the country’s new constitution. The vote starts this week. The military have banned the Muslin Brotherhood and arrested many activists in eh months before the referendum. So this is now the military backed government’s attempt to legitimize its coup …

The cogs of the Egyptian media machine are in motion once again as we approach yet another referendum on the constitution. When out and about in Cairo, it is hard not to notice the posters plastered everywhere urging the public to vote. Radio and television channels are buzzing with it, …

Is Egypt’s new draft constitution the best the country has ever known? Do the drafters (the “C50”) deserve the credit that many have been affording them? The text certainly includes a number of important improvements.

“It’s like 2011 all over again. The army and the police have no fear, and are using the courts to ratify their oppression. They’re even arresting the same activists they arrested two years ago,” an Egyptian colleague told me as we read the news that dozens of Egyptian activists had …